Rotation Sensing Lasers in General Relativity: Some Technical Notes and Current Advances

We review the current status of large ring laser gyroscopes having the potential to contribute to terrestrial measurements of general relativistic precessions. At this point in time, although these devices possess the raw sensitivity for such a measurement, they remain limited by long-term geometric...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inUniverse (Basel) Vol. 5; no. 9; p. 190
Main Authors Schreiber, K. Ulrich, Gebauer, André, Kodet, Jan, Anyi, Caroline L., Wells, Jon-Paul R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 21.08.2019
Subjects
earth rotation sensing
Expected values
Experiments
Gravitational waves
Gravity
Lasers
ring laser gyroscopes
Sagnac interferometry
Sensors
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Summary:We review the current status of large ring laser gyroscopes having the potential to contribute to terrestrial measurements of general relativistic precessions. At this point in time, although these devices possess the raw sensitivity for such a measurement, they remain limited by long-term geometric instability, detection noise and imperfections in the physical models required to isolate geophysical effects. Furthermore, minute non-reciprocal biases provide a null-shift error and therefore no currently constructed laser system meets the requirement of absolute rotation rate sensing. Nevertheless, we are of the view that these are surmountable problems and the ability of ring laser gyroscopes to measure low frequency to DC signals has vastly increased in the last decade.
ISSN:2218-1997
2218-1997
DOI:10.3390/universe5090190